Alister MacKenzie, Augusta National, and the 1930s in America

00:00:00
Speaker 1: What was Alistair McKenzie up to in the nineteen thirties. For one thing, he was building Augusta National, But more generally, mackenzie was exploring new forms of golf architecture during this period. In many ways, he was at his most experimental and even radical in the time between the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine and his death in nineteen thirty four. That's what I'm talking about today with Josh Pettit. Josh is a golf architect, an associate with the firm Clayton, Devrees and Pont, and the founder of the Alistair McKenzie Institute. And in this episode, Josh and I will focus on what we can learn from Alistair McKenzie's wild nineteen thirties, how this era of McKenzie's career influenced the design of Augusta National, and how it might light the way forward for golf architecture in the twenty first century. I'm Garrett Morrison, and this is designing golf, Okay, Josh, I want to just set the scene a little bit here. It's late nineteen twenty nine. Where is Alistair McKenzie in his golf architecture career at this point.

00:01:16
Speaker 2: In late nineteen nineteen twenty nine, he was had just opened Pasta Tampo in September September eighth, nineteen twenty nine. The Valley Club of Montecito would shortly open after that, in December thirtieth, nineteen twenty nine. So you know, keep in mind historically the crash of nineteen twenty nine was September, and that influenced a lot of things going forward. But yeah, as far as McKenzie's career, he had just finished Past Tempo Valley Club was just getting ready to open.

00:01:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I find this to be a really poignant moment in history. Pasa Teampo opens in September nineteen twenty nine. This is kind of mackenzie at the height of his powers. That first group out at Pasa Tiempo is Marion Hollins, Bobby Jones, Cyril Tolly, Glenna Colette. There are these beautiful photos from that day from Julian Graham, some of the best golf photos of the nineteen twenties taken of that day. It looked like it was great weather. This is kind of the height of the Roaring twenties. And then almost immediately after that, the stock market crashes, the world changes, and we're into a new period of Mackenzie's career. So just to give people a general notion of kind of why we're talking about this subject, You've told me before in the emails that we exchanged about this conversation prior to this, you told me that you find this kind of three and a half year period between the stock market crash and Mackenzie's death in January nineteen thirty four to be the most interesting period of his career. Why is that in general?

00:03:05
Speaker 2: Well, I think there are several reasons. You know, first of all, he was getting he was just I think, starting to get really comfortable working outside the box. You know, he was in this very experimental phase. And you know, as far as the economization is concerned, or the effects of the depression. Leading up to that, he had been thinking more and more in terms of economization, economization of construction, economization of design, economization of maintenance. And it was at this point where he started feeling comfortable doing less conventional type of work, like we would say, is maybe a lot fewer bunkers, a lot more short grass, a lot more extreme landforms, big wild undulating greens with wild internal contours and also like wild tongues sticking out on sides and fronts and backs. So he was really pushing the bounds. And if you compare this work to the stuff he was doing just a few years earlier, which was also fantastic, you know that prior work that he had been doing was much more toned down by comparison, and so, you know, I think, first of all, just to sort of set the stage just more broadly, you know, looking at his career, I kind of think of his career his golf architecture career, because that was actually his third career. First career was of medicine, second career was a military and there's a lot that could be talked about with both of those, but his third career was really golf course architecture, and of that career I kind of break that down into three phases. The first phase was pre World War One, pre Great War, and where he was just doing stuff in the UK and a little bit in Ireland. Then the war interrupt did that. The second phase was after the war, which consisted of actually like rebuilding a lot of courses that had been repurposed for military use, a lot of stuff all in the UK, and that was from really like nineteen eighteen, because he was discharged even before the ward ended, you know, the Treaty of Versailles was until nineteen nineteen. But starting nineteen eighteen he started working again and all the way through until the end of nineteen twenty five, that's kind of his second phase. Beginning of nineteen twenty six, he departs for America and starts what I call is like international phase of his career, and that's extended from you know, January of nineteen twenty six until he died in January of nineteen thirty four. But of that last phase, I think I also conceptualized it as breaking that down into like two sub phases, call it phase three A and three B. Three A would have been all the stuff he was doing pre depression, so like January nineteen twenty six through what we were just talking about, which is like end of nineteen twenty nine, and then the second phase would be like post depression, basically end of nineteen twenty nine through the time he died in January of nineteen thirty four. And then you could also extend a little beyond because for instance, the plan he did for the Ohio State golf course, which was two golf courses. They actually used his plan, but they didn't start building it until nineteen thirty eight for the Scarlet, in the nineteen forty for the Gray. So that second part of his third phase of his career, I think is when he really started getting comfortable, like I said, experimenting with wilder greens, much fewer bunkers. And we'll come back to that, I think, because I think that's really important, creating interest with landforms, short grass, using natural features more like creeks or whatever he could use on a property. And there was another component there too, where he was starting to get sites to work on that weren't as good, so he was getting more mundane, kind of flatter sites with less interesting features, and that gave him license to start experimenting with actually just entirely manufacturing stuff as opposed to using stuff like dunes in the case of Cyprus Point or other cool features. He had to really manufacture a lot of interest. And you know, the Jockey Pub is a fantastic example of this, and we can come back to that as well. But again, this combination of his approach to economization given the depression and having not as interesting sites to work on and having to really manufacture that interest build a golf course that was going to be economical to construct, an economical to maintain and operate.

00:08:02
Speaker 1: You would think that economization and needing to manufacture stuff would be at odds with each other. Does seem to be kind of countervailing impulses or would seem to work against each other.

00:08:21
Speaker 2: Not necessarily. I mean, there's a number of ways you can look at this. There's you know, in one instance, you can think of it as manufacturing or augmenting a site in the construction phase in order to set it up so that it's easier to maintain during the operations phase once it's actually playable. So this could be thought of as like, say, if you have some heavy soils, amending the soils, well, yeah, there's an expense to that, but if you admortize that expense over the lifespan of the golf course, you're going to save a ton of money in the maintenance phase. So it's doing these things on the front end to save on the back end, likewise constructing landforms, moving earth around. And we'll come back to the advance and equipment, which was also coinciding with his timeframe where initially he was building stuff with horses and scrapers and plows and manual labor to create these landforms, and then he started using bulldozers and excavators right around that same time nineteen twenty eight, nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty, and so it became cheaper to move earth he could build landforms. And yeah, there's an expense to that, but if you create an interesting landform that has some strategic value to it and it's all just short grass, well, going forward in the future, once the course is open, it's operational, you're maintaining it. It's so much less expensive to maintain short grass that could just be mode with mechanical mower than it is to have five bunkers right there that have drainage implications that have to be raked, all the things that we know, you know, the meanings that goes into bunkers. Bunkers are very maintenance intensive. So this is this idea of doing things during the construction phase, and there's also a way to value engineer a lot of that stuff in order to make a course operational and really economies economized the maintenance and operations of the course. Once it's open.

00:10:28
Speaker 1: Okay. So this idea of economization, which was a big theme for McKenzie throughout his career, not just during the depression, but the depression kind of raised the stakes of economization. I guess you could say, what did economization mean to Mackenzie when it came to golf course design. You've talked a little bit about what the implications of economization might be for maintaining a golf course going forward, but what about that initial design phase can be economized from Kenzie's perspective during this period.

00:11:03
Speaker 2: Well, let me just start by saying his you know, he was really a student of economics, and I always like to say, you know, Mackenzie had the heart of a doctor, the mind of an engineer and or economists, and the soul of an artist. And you know, so he really approached things in the construction and this goes back to building military trenches during the war. He really thought of engineering and how to economize things. He was always very interested in economics and a student of economics, and he was talking about the importance of economizing golf construction, golf maintenance long before the depression hit. So, you know, like as early as nineteen fourteen, he was giving lectures on economy and golf course construction and greenkeeping over in the UK to greenkeepers. By nineteen twenty, when he published his seminal book Golf Architecture, the subtitle was Economy and Golf Course Construction and Greenkeeping.

00:12:08
Speaker 1: Yeah right, he was.

00:12:09
Speaker 2: Nineteen twenty, So it wasn't just the depression, you know, he was not late to the game. He was thinking, well in advance. Sorry, do you want to interject there?

00:12:22
Speaker 1: No, not at all. I like that you pointed out the subtitle of that book because it is kind of an odd subtitle from our perspective. Why talk about economy right there? And basically the title of the book. But it was a big theme for Mackenzie. He wrote on this and spoke on this many times during the nineteen twenties, not just the nineteen thirties. But please yet, yeah continue, Yeah, well.

00:12:47
Speaker 2: And so I think the way I can sceptualize it is Mackenzie thought in terms of the economization consisted of three verticals, the economization of design, commonization of construction, in the economization conomization of maintenance or operations, however you want to characterize it, and those three verticals were inextricably linked. So in other words, the way you design something is going to affect the way you're going to build it, and the way you're going to buld it is going to affect the way you're going to maintain it. And so you have to really think through the entire process from beginning to end and not really has separation. Whereas you know, a lot of other architects in those days, and then especially after World War Two, they thought of things, you know, largely two dimensionally. Draw it on a piece of paper, give it to a contractor. Contractor would have to worry about figuring out how to build it. And then once it was built, then it was handed over to a superintendent and the superintendent would have to figure out how to maintain it. Well, you know, because Mackenzie was, first of all, he was an engineer by trade in the military, he thought of you know, when you was designing something, he was really thinking in terms of how is it going to actually build it? And then also he was a student of agonomics, and he wrote a lot about turf grass agonomics, and he was very astute and studied a lot of the best turf grass experts in those days. And so he had a really really good understanding of the maintenance phase of a golf course once it was already built. And so from beginning to end, when he was starting with a raw site, thinking of, you know, how he was going to route the holes around it, how he was going to place features, how he's going to play off some natural features, and then he was thinking of how he was going to build it, and then how it would be maintained in the future. So he had all three of those perspectives.

00:14:47
Speaker 1: Okay, great, that gives us a nice little organization of this idea of economization. Were there any other ideas aside from economization and those kind of three pillars that you see Mackenzie as experimenting with or exploring more deeply in the nineteen thirties that we should know about.

00:15:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think you know, he was he was entering a phase where he became more comfortable, for lack of a better term, building template holes. So this was where, you know, again going back to the idea of he didn't have his interesting sites. Starting at the Jockey Club, which is basically just a flat, pretty pretty dead flat piece of land, and he had to manufacture stuff or the planning laid out for Club Nautico Santa Sedro in Argentina, which never got built, that was literally going to be one hundred percent manufacturer built from dredgings, similar to the way that the Lada was built, and so, and those gave him opportunities. And then going forward to Bayside in New York and then Augusta National, he had all these opportunities where he was starting to think more in terms of pulling inspiration from his favorite holes in the UK and Ireland, a lot from Saint Andrews and some elsewhere, and so he was he was taking the design con sensorrom these holes. He was purposely not trying to copy them. And he writes about this, He's like, I'm not trying to copy these holes. I'm trying to take inspiration from the concept of these holes and apply them to a different site and in some cases improve them. And so he became much more comfortable doing this template phase of design, and he was doing that more and more where like in the case of Nadico San Casedro, in the case of Bayside, in the case of Augusta. Also at charp Park, he was using a lot of these same templates and building different versions of those holes. So I think that was that was a key differentiation where he was doing that a little bit before, but not much much less frequently.

00:16:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, sort of a delayed convert to this idea, considering that it reached the height of its fashion in the tens and twenties with MacDonald and Rainer.

00:17:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm hesitant to use them because I don't think he would classify them as templates. I'm not a McDonald or Rainer expert, but I don't think they would necessarily even call him templates. But that's the nomenclature I think that we nowadays think of.

00:17:23
Speaker 1: I want to come back to this when we talk about Augusta National because I think the way that he used template quote unquote ideas was pretty interesting there where he was kind of choosing sort of off brand aspects of certain holes to emulate as opposed to the most notable aspects of those holes. The fifth hole at Augusta National will be a perfect example of this, where he just kind of imitated odd aspects of the road hole as opposed to the ones that you would you would usually think of incorporating into a road hole template. But just for a quick digress here and then we'll get back to the architecture. I wanted to note I'm not sure how much research you've done into this yourself, or if there's if this is just something i'll talk about, but Mackenzie had some personal financial struggles during the nineteen thirties that that I think are worth noting because this was this did seem to really affect his life. You know, like many people, he sort of just ran out of money and ran out of sources of income during this period. What what are what were some of those those difficulties that he had.

00:18:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, you're right, you know, he was really affected by the depression. He was having a hard time getting clients to pay him for work he'd already done.

00:18:44
Speaker 1: Or specifically having a hard time getting AUGUSTA National to pay him and Clifford Roberts to puny up.

00:18:50
Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, but they weren't the only ones, and I think this was common probably, I mean for people in pretty much every industry. It's like you you were on you know, you were in a project, you had contractors that were, you know, not getting paid entirely. You had architects not getting paid entirely. So yeah, he you know, he was really struggling, and you know, he there's letters of him writing from Pasa Tampa like you know, my power, my electricity, my power is about to get turned off. Really yeah. Yeah, but you know, I think you know, he did a lot, He did everything he could. He was still he was still really active, working a lot. He was writing a ton in those days. So he you know, this was kind of the you know I mentioned earlier, you kind of had three careers, you know, medicine, military, and golf architecture. You could say his fourth career was really as a writer because he wrote so much, you know, going back before his golf career, wrote about medicine a lot, you know, all throughout his military career and even beyond you wrote about camouflage and military and then in the golf space, you know, he wrote a ton about golf. And so he was in those years from like nineteen twenty nine, thirty thirty three up until he died, he was writing a ton of articles, getting them published in different golf publications. And there's I don't know exactly the details of that. I've never founding on that, but I'm sure he was getting paid like a little bit, you know, to publish different articles, and he had that's also in the phase when he was you know, had finished compiling what would become The Spirit of Saint Andrews and trying to get that published. And to your point, like he had this finish manuscript and he couldn't get it published, and like, you know, that's something he'd been working on for years, but no publisher wanted to underwrite it in those days, and so he was just doing everything he could to you know, to make ends meet.

00:20:52
Speaker 1: So let's talk about some of Mackenzie's specific projects during this period. I've organized these into kind of three buckets, and you can tell me if these buckets don't work very well or if there's a better way of organizing them. But I have first of all his South American projects, which include the Jockey Club and the never built you know, just laid out El Bocrone, which has recently bubbled back up into the to the golf world's consciousness. I have another bucket of his public course projects in the United States. These would include Sharp Park outside of San Francisco, hagen Oaks in Sacramento, and Bayside Links in New York or what is now a heavily developed part of Queens as I understand it. And then we have Augusta National, which was sort of the major project of the period. It stood out in its complexity from the others, and it stood out in terms of the amount of money that he was promised or that he expected to earn from the Commission. And so that was kind of its own bucket, his his Augusta project with Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts. So what don't we start with, Well, first of all, tell me if those buckets work for you, if there are any additional buckets.

00:22:19
Speaker 2: No, I think that's actually that's that's pretty well organized.

00:22:22
Speaker 1: Okay, cool South.

00:22:25
Speaker 2: Into the public stuff. You could throw in the Ohio State project.

00:22:27
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, yeah, there's the university projects. I guess the University of Michigan course was completed during this period, but perhaps designed earlier, and so there are these kind of twenty yeah designed it. So that was that was kind of in this period. So maybe that's its own bucket. The university courses of the Midwest that Perry Maxwell was involved with as his associate, and then Perry Maxwell himself went on to design the course for Iowa State that those are Those are kind of a collection onto themselves. But what don't we wh do we talk about South America. He went to South America in early nineteen thirty. This is kind of like leftover momentum from the Roaring twenties. I suppose the depression hadn't fully hit at this point. Eventually it ended up affecting many of these projects. But he goes to South America, he does a bunch of design work. It's sort of similar in some ways to his trip to Australia in nineteen twenty six nineteen twenty seven, where he kind of acts as a Johnny Appleseed, has a major project or two, but also sprinkles his influence throughout some other courses. But of course, many of these courses didn't end up really getting completed or built in the way that he would have imagined. That's the big contrast between his South American trip and his Australian trip. In Australia, many of those courses did come to be in a really kind of complete way. But South America, why don't we start with the Jockey Club. Tell me about this project and what was unique about it?

00:24:05
Speaker 2: Sure? We really quick, I think it's interesting that you got to keep in mind the historical context of what was happening in the world in this timeframe, and there was so much change happening in the world with a global depression combined with the advance in the advance in manufacturing heavy equipment and including airplanes. So I just think it's kind of interesting that the first time mackenzie and maybe the only time he flew on an airplane was at the beginning of his journey to Argentina. So he flew from la to Chicago and what they referred to as an aeroplane and then took a train to New York and then a boat down to Buenos Aires.

00:24:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, boat travel was really his thing. Before that. He took a boat to Australia, which was quite.

00:25:00
Speaker 2: All over the world. Multiple times, he like circumnavigated the globe. Yeah. So yeah, when you get to you know, Jockey Club, that was the commission that brought him there, similar to as you mentioned, Royal Melbourne was the commission that brought him to Australia. But he thought, ah, this is a long journey and maybe there's opportunity here. And you know, historically Argentina had been a wealthy, a very wealthy country. You know. By eighteen eighty eighteen ninety timeframe, I think Argentina was still per capital of the wealthiest country in the world until the United States overtook it. And so there was a history of wealth there and because of the British influence, there was a real interesting golf and that had been really percolating in the nineteen twenties, and so the founders of the Jockey Club were really keen to have what they called a Britisher, someone who was like expert in the ideas of golf course architecture come and design that course. And they got in contact with the United States Golf Association actually, who recommended this Britisher living in California named Alistair McKenzie. That was the connection there. So he went to Buenos Aires. Initially the site it was going to be twenty seven holes, it was going to be an eighteen hole course and a nine hole course, and then he figured out there was like enough land to build two thirty six hole courses, which is now the Red and the Blue. Yeah, and that was his gateway into South America, where he landed a number of other design commissions, including the Club Nauico Santa Cedro, which I think we should come back to that because that's a really fascinating project. The marta Plata Club, which was at the time like the only really considered good golf course in Argentina, and McKenzie wrote about it and he said he was very impressed. It was kind of like a seaside links course. It was their best course. He did some consulting work for them and put together a plan of improvements which they didn't actually use. And then there was a separate club called marta Plata Parque Camet, not the same marta Plata, different group of guys, and he designed a twenty seven whole course for them, which never got built. Also, and then there was as you mentioned, Elboquerone, which was going to be a private estate course, and we should come back to that also. But then there was in Montevideo, Uruguay. It was the Gulf of the Uruguay Club that he designed an eighteen whole course for. And also at the same time he wrote about how he got hired by several including El Bouqueron, but other people to build private estate courses, and so Elbouqarone was like actually like a full on eighteen whole course, but he designed other smaller estate courses for people in and around Buenos series of like six holes with eighteen tea boxes, criss crossing little short courses, pitch and putt courses. He did a bunch of that stuff, and it's not well documented and I've had a hard time actually like tracking down what of that stuff ever got built. But he had like actually like a fair amount of design commissions for a two month stretch when he was in South America.

00:28:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, good amount of work. Again, similar in a lot of ways to what he did in Argentina. Why don't we focus in then, on three of those commissions. We've got the Jockey Club. We've got the Club Nottaco Santa Cidro, which you've mentioned a couple of times and I'm curious to find out more about that because i know nothing about it, and then Elbo Corone. So the Jockey Club. This was not a particularly gifted piece of land, and so how then did McKenzie react to it?

00:29:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, And we sort of touched on this a little earlier. This was when he started becoming much more comfortable manufacturing features and because it was a flat site, there's a couple of things he needed to accomplish. One he needed to create strategic interest. Two, on a flat site, you have drainage problems. You need to figureut how to move water. And so he devised this really clever scheme where he cut this network of swales that zigzagged through the whole property, and that network of swales facilitated the drainage. And then with all of that material that was cut from those swales, he used that material to actually build up all these landforms, mostly around green complexes, and so it was like this balancing act where he didn't have to import material, he didn't have to export material. He cut these swales on site that created the drainage network, and then with that materially created these very eccentric mounds, you know, and this was I think a foreshadowing of what would come at Augusta, because you know, there's sort of like some famous green complexes like the sixteenth at the Red Course you've probably seen with these just gynamic, monstrous mounds. And there's another thing too where this is the first time he built a double green, a shared green, which I think we'll come back to that in a second. You know, the ninth and eighteenth greens of the blue course were one double green. So that was for him, that was a wildly different approach to designing and building a golf course than he had ever done before anywhere else.

00:30:46
Speaker 1: Okay, tell me about the Club Nautico Santa Cedra. What are the basics of this project.

00:30:52
Speaker 2: So the club, the Natica Santasedrol Club was right on the River Platte, and the river Platte at that point is like sixty miles wide. It's massive. But they needed to deepen the river the base of it for like steamships to go through. And so the founders of the club Nauco Santa Sedro, they actually previously had It was a casino and apparently gambling had been outlawed, had just been outlawed in Argentina, so they needed to figure out another way to like bring in revenue and keep themselves relevant, and so they thought, oh, I'll build a golf course. So they had this piece of land on the river Platte that was literally underwater. It was like Mackenzie described seeing the site, and he didn't walk the site. He in a little motor boat, drove a motorboat all around the site in this area that was like two to five feet deep in water, and he's like, ah, there's not much to look at here, it's just it's all underwater. But like you know, so and so, the plan was they were going to be given all these dredgings from the river, and the company that was doing that or the government, I guess who's funding it, they were going to pay for that to happen. So essentially the club was going to get you know, like it was going to be a pretty cheap build them to build this golf course. And this was Mackenzie's version. I think it's fair to say of what Cebe McDonald did at the Lido, right. Yeah, this was like, first of all, a gigantic feet of engineering just to take these dredgings from the river, put them onto a site that was essentially reclaimed land, and then shape them into features and build a golf course on it. There was a massive feet of engineering, but it gave Mackenzie again license to think completely outside the box, like there's no natural features here to work with, so we've got to build everything like one hundred percent. Every square inch of the site had to be completely manufactured and That's where he started thinking of, well, hey, if I've got the ability to just manufacture everything, then why not look to some of my favorite holes at Saint Andrews and elsewhere in the UK and again not copy those holes, but use them as inspiration. So like, for instance, you know, and he writes about this, like the four part threes at Nautico Santa Sedro were all modeled after some of his favorite part three's or what he would say is like, arguably the best part three is in the world, and the fourth hole was modeled after the sixteenth at Cyprus Point. The eighth hole, Part three was modeled after the Eden, the eleventh at Saint Andrews, the eleventh hole Part three was modeled after the Badan, and the fifteenth hole, Part three was modeled after the Gibraltar hole that he built. That was the eighth holl at Moretown and now it is the tenth hole because of the routing change. And then on other holes, you know, the seventh was his reproduction of the Liedo hole, So the Leedle hole that he built at Theledo that he you know, famous for the design competition that he won in nineteen fourteen, which was really his introduction to golf in America. That was kind of the first time anybody in America heard of who he was. He built a version of the Liedo. It's like almost identical if you if you look at the plan, which was the seventh hole or it didn't get built, but it would have been. It would have been, you know, the seventh hole at Club Nautico, Santasedro. And the thirteenth hole was modeled after the first at St. Andrews with the burn cutting in front of it. And let's see, yeah, the fourteenth was modeled after the road hole St. Andrews, the fifteenth was modeled after the fourteenth at Saint Andrews, and the seventheenth, I think was modeled after the second hole at Saint Andrews. So on so many of these holes. He was just basically like, hey, I and manufacture this out of nothing, and let's just look to some of my favorite holes and put them together into a really interesting routing. And so I maintain that this is the most interesting, this is the most interesting design golf course that has never been built.

00:35:20
Speaker 1: Very cool. This is new information to me. So I'm fascinated and it is kind of an answer to the question of if you're not inspired by the land, if you're Mackenzie and you're not inspired by the land, what are you inspired by? Well, you maybe start to be more influenced by the courses that you've seen and you use that as a starting point as opposed to the terrain. So fascinating project there, let's talk about it.

00:35:51
Speaker 2: I would kind of refer to that as I mean, again, this is me trying to get inside of his head. But I think the way he was thinking of this was minimals over naturalism, or minimalism beyond naturalism, you know, whereas if you have like a really gifted site, it's trying to use the natural features as best as you could if you have no sight at all. He's still building what I think he would consider a minimalist design with minimalist features, although he wouldn't probably refer to them as that. But it was all manufactured.

00:36:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, still doing as little as possible to produce interest in golf. But you have to do more to produce interest in golf.

00:36:32
Speaker 2: And then if it does do that, if you do that again, you can build a course in a way. Because he learned a lot over the previous twenty years of building courses, you could build a course in a way that would lead it to being really easy to maintain. And more importantly, this concept that he would always refer to time and time again, this concept of finality, and what he meant by finality was the true acid test of a golf course is if you can build a golf course and then it never has to be renovated. Yeah, if you can build a golf course and fifty years later, one hundred years later, like at St. Andrew's, basically it's still the same and it's still great, and it doesn't have to be constantly renovated with you know, every ten years by a green committee saying like oh let's redo our bunkers and oh let's redo our greens. He was always trying to build something in a way both from an infrastructure standpoint, in the engineering of how the construction would happen, and then from a design standpoint, in a way that would be interesting and you would endure. And if you could accomplish finality, that was really the acid test of a good golf course.

00:37:40
Speaker 1: So tell me about you author, Oh no, no, it's okay. Tell me about Elbow Corone let's move on to that one.

00:37:48
Speaker 2: So Elbo Corone was an estate course. Senior an k Arena had a massive piece of land, I think it was like ten thousand acres and he allocated this little parcel that he thought he had previously built a nine hole course. So when mackenzie got there and surveyed the land, there was like a very rudimentary, amateurish nine hole golf course there. And McKenzie came over the plan to basically just demo that completely build eighteen holes. And the idea is that it was going to be nine double greens that he'd hit into from opposite directions. And he got this inspiration again going back to the old course. You know, there's a steam that keeps coming up on again, which is he had this great reverence for the old course. He held it in the highest of the steam. He and Bobby Jones both thought it was the gold standard. And at St Andrew's, you know, seven of those green complexes are played into for fourteen holes. They're massive, twenty twenty five thousand square foot greens that you're hitting into from opposite directions. And so at el book Rome he thought, well, let's do all eighteen holes. That way, build nine massive double greens. The routing would set it up so that you hit into these from opposing almost opposing directions, not always exactly opposing, but from different angles and very very few bunkers. So I think another interesting thing to think of is like the progression of the amount of bunkers he was building on a golf course, you know, pre nineteen pre crash in nineteen twenty nine, a lot of his courses have like over one hundred bunkers, and then he got to a point where there was like, you know, maybe eighty bunkers at Union League, which is now Green Hills, And then you fast forward a little bit and at El book Rome fourteen bunkers. And in the case of nat A Custanta Cidro, I think it was like seventeen bunkers. Case of Bayside it was nineteen bunkers. Augusta was like twenty two bunkers. So there's this huge shift from building you know, one hundred or more bunkers on a course to like twenty or fewer bunkers. And Elbookrone again it was nine double greens, fourteen bunkers, and it was really tight, compact routing that would lend itself to this like kind of just intimate experience. But again this was built for an estate court, or it was going to be built for an estate course, so it was just a private owner. Well it never got built.

00:40:39
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf is brought to you by the USGA Green Section. Meet the smartest ball in golf, the GS three from the USGA Green Section. The GS three ball collects over fifteen thousand data points that instantly measure your green's firmness, speed, smoothness, and trueness just drop and roll. Integrated with the Deacon management system, the GS three ball provides quicker role tests, precise measurements, automatic data upload, and eliminates operator bias. You can now make data driven decisions, better manage resources, communicate to course personnel, and most importantly, create a playing experience for your golfers like never before. Start your data collection journey today with the GS three ball and Deacon. Visit gsshop dot USGA dot org for more. Thank you to the USGA Green Section for supporting Designing Golf. Let's get back to the episode. So let's move on to McKenzie's public course projects and maybe we could just touch on. I mean, they're all fascinating, but I'd like to just touch on one of them that I see as really being out of the box projects again were Sharp Park, which Geez has its own history and deserves its own deep dive, its own episode, and at some point I'll do that on this podcast. But this is, uh, you know, this is a course that's haunted my dreams for for a long time. It still exists, just not in the form that it was originally built, and it's a it's a it's a distressed municipal property at this point. It's it's been threatened by closure, and there there's a group of people that has fought very hard, valiantly to keep it open, and there have been some indications that they might be able to do some work there, some renovation to try to bring back some of the aspects of this original design, but but we're not sure what the outcome of that is going to be at this point. So we can just leave that there with with Sharp Park, hagen Oaks is currently being looked at by Brett Hachstein, and I hope that they're able to do something interesting there. But the one that I really want to dig into is bay Side Lenks the New York course. This is a lost course, now mL E. What was Bayside Lenks? Why was it interesting?

00:43:10
Speaker 2: Actually, you know, interestingly enough. You know, I have the old aerial for Bayside and I pitched this to a developer. I did a plan for this in Florida, I think in twenty seventeen or eighteen, to recreate the bay Side course. Actually in Florida. This was before the Kaisers, who I love ever, you know, had started talking about Liedo at least at Sand Valley, and I had always been so fascinated with this course. I thought it would be, you know, a great public golf course. And so I had a really good site that was a city owned property in Florida. It had been a municipal property and something that would have been really affordable to build, really affordable to maintain, and really fun and interesting to play. So yeah, you know, it was. There's some interesting things here that tie into Augusta. You know. The timeframe was he started building this in nineteen thirty one, just before he started the construction for Augusta. And it was the same architect or it was the same contract that he was working with Wendell Miller, and they had just started kind of experimenting with heavy equipment bulldozers, namely and excavators. Going back, Mackenzie had used a bulldozer once before that, which was at the Valley Club. But the only thing they used the bulldozer for the Valley Club was to move boulders around and then to bury boulders, to cover boulders with material because they were too big to move. So like on the east side of the property, they did that a lot. They didn't use a bulldozer to actually shape any of the golf features. It was just a function of like, oh, we could use these like really rudimentary I mean, if you look at what these bulldozers looked like, very rudimentary bulldozers to just push boulders around. Well, you fast forward three years at Bayside and the advent of dozers had becoming you know, they'd improved and they were becoming more used on construction projects. And so they experimented at Bayside and that's the first time he used a dozer to really shape features greens and you know, and also in the case of Bayside, that was also a flat property that he had to create some interest. So he was building landforms, and you know, he did things like he buried a stone wall that went through the property, and so he was cutting material from a flat site filling it in other parts of the site to cover old stone walls and to create shape. And that was important because that really informed the way they built Augusta. And he talks about this, he writes about this, how the experimental phase they went through at Bayside was very, very informative and very useful a year later when they started building Augusta. So that was again that was going to be a daily fee course. It was like really really inexpensive to play, and and there weren't there were very few daily feed courses in those days. I mean that was like kind of outside the box. Like if you're a developer, you would never think to build a daily feed golf course. But you know, he he took this flat site, manufactured a lot of really interesting landforms and really interesting greens. They had nineteen bunkers, so again this economy of bunkering, and and then that led into the following year building.

00:46:44
Speaker 1: Augusta Bayside was very well received. What eventually happened to it? Why does it no longer exist.

00:46:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, even through the depression, like in the early thirties, you know it it was extremely popular and it was doing well financially, and it was just packed. It got a ton of usage. What ended up happening is, I believe like starting fifty four, early mid fifties, fifty four fifty five, a developer bought the golf course and they determined because of just the demand for housing. You know, everything outside of New York City was expanding in those days, and there was such a demand for housing that the land itself was just way more valuable as a housing development than it was as a golf course. And a tale is all this time exactly exactly, and I'm kind of taking an educated guest here that there weren't, you know, zoning restrictions that prevented them from doing that. It wasn't like, oh, this has to be zone recreational or whatever. It was just like, yeah, they bought it, Oh yeah, we could build a bunch of houses on it. And actually what had happened is prior to that, houses had been built kind of like all around it, and there's a school bayside schools around it. So if you look at the old Aerial. There's like the golf course is just a rectangle and it's surrounded by development and then and that just tells the story of you know, that rectangle that like one hundred and eighty acres or whatever it was, would end up being so much more valuable as a housing development than as a golf course. Sadly.

00:48:26
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. When people ask what would be the most interesting course to revive in the way that the Leado was revived in Wisconsin, my answer has always been Bayside. And so it's interesting to hear you say that that there there may have been an effort in this direction at one point. Perhaps that will come back around.

00:48:48
Speaker 2: But still working on it, Yeah, still working on it. Yeah, no, I agree with you.

00:48:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well that brings us to Augusta National. How do all of these themes of Mackenzie's nineteen thirties converge on Augusta National, The things that he's thinking about, the new stuff that he's trying at golf courses. How do you see those those threads emerging in the design of Augusta National.

00:49:18
Speaker 2: Yeah. So at Augusta the goal was to build the world's best inland course. You know, they set the marker high and they made no bones about it. I mean that's they said that explicitly, like we're going to build the world's best inland golf course. Meaning at that time all the best courses were mostly in the British Isles, seaside courses in and around Dune's Land, or places like Cyprus Point in California or you know National Golf Links, which he revered places like that, and so at Augusta they thought like, well, you know, I'm going to use Mackenzie thought, I'm gonna use all my knowledge that I've gained, all of my earned insight from the last twenty five years of building golf courses and apply that to building on this inland site, a site that was actually like pretty severe, you know, not a beautiful, picturesque piece of land, but not an easy piece of land to build a golf course on.

00:50:24
Speaker 1: But he's not really that well suited to golf, Like it's the elevation change is too big to be considered well suited.

00:50:30
Speaker 2: To golf exactly exactly. And this really showcases Mackenzie's brilliance in routing a golf course. You know, a lot of think people think of Mackenzie for his wild greens or bunkers or but I think actually his true genius, beyond any of that, was his ability to rout a golf course in the most interesting and efficient way as possible. And I don't think there's anybody on the planet that could to devise a better routing scheme for that property at Augusta than Mackenzie. But again, this is when he was starting to get experimental. And then this was also we're well into the depression at this point, and so there was this huge, you know cloud, this this cloud of economics, the economic climate overhanging this, and there's all sorts of stories we could we could go into about, you know, the financials of the development and how it almost didn't happen, and then once it did happen, it almost went bankrupt, and the club was restructured four times all the way through the fifties, and it's just it's miraculous that it even existed to begin with, and then it actually survived and it is what it is today. But you know, he was trying to economize again, economize the design, economized the construction and using again his experience of using heavy machinery at Bayside. He used bulldozers at Augusta, which sign efficantly reduced the labor costs as opposed to doing things with just large crews of manual labor. And then there was this there is this component of paying homage to his favorite holes, you know, the template, the template exercise, so to speak. And you know, so we talked about this Garrett last year on the podcast which did specifically about Augusta. But so many of these holes at Augusta were really based off of the design concept was taken from many of his and Bobby Jones' favorite holes in the UK, and they both they both equally revered St Andrew's. To them, that was both the gold standards. So they were essentially trying to build a Saint Andrews like course on an inland property. But that wasn't flat the way that Sat Andrews was flat. It's very steep as you as you mentioned, and so we could go through it. But like many of those holes were you know, based off of some of the great the great holes at Saint Andrews and then throughout the British islds.

00:53:08
Speaker 1: What are a couple of your favorite examples of template concepts at Augusta National and I would I would consider them to be very much remixed template concepts. But just to give people an idea of how Mackenzie and Jones were working with influence in this design, what are a couple of specific examples that people should look to.

00:53:30
Speaker 2: Well, you know, the fourth was built after the Eden, which you know, most people, I think, including Mackenzie, would have considered the Eden at Saint Andrews the premier one shot hole in the world. And that was really really interesting because that was a very different take on what the Eden was. You know, the fifth was based after the Road Hole. We talked about that. The sixth was really his version of the Verdan. But to me, what's really interesting, there's a couple answers that you did, this one which sadly no longer exists, which was the seventh hole. The seventh hole had no bunkers. The green was built was the concept was derived from the eighteenth at Saint Andrew's the value of Sin, and it was you know, going back to this idea that Mackenzie was experimenting with these wild tongues sticking out in different directions on different greens. He had this front right section that came way down and then it wrapped around to the back left. It created this giant almost like a horseshoe green, but like a horseshoe at an angle really severe. And then in between those two giant sections of the green was the value of Sin. And again no bunkers, and that hole does not exist at the seventh that Augusta now is completely different. They pushed the green back. The green's totally different. It's surrounded by bunkers. And then they narrowed the fairway over the years by planting trees, so that hole basically is just gone. But if you look at the old photos of that hole, you'll see how wild that green was.

00:55:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, and.

00:55:11
Speaker 2: Depending on where the flag location would be on a certain day, if it was back left or front right, that would dictate like what side of the fairway you'd want to land your t shot on, which would give you the best angle of approach into that green. And so just that strategy I think is really interesting. You know, I love the Valley of Sin just as at Saint Andrews's as a concept and the fact that he applied it in a super unique way there. And then the other ants I give you is actually the eighth the eighth pole is a great example of where he started doing these real, really wild, giant landforms, which had really started at the jockey Club previously. If you look at like a photo of the sixteenth pole on the Red Course at the Jockey Club and you see these giant manufactured landforms, and then you look at the eighth hold augustin National, you'd say, oh, yeah, there's this, there's this connection there and just you know, the eighth is a par five uphill. But the green he was trying to build it was what he considered his take on a punch bowl green, although if you looked at it you would probably not think of it as a punch bowl, but just the way he built all these landforms to feed shots into different portions of the green, that was like a quasi punch bowl. And I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, I'm glad we have that back because we lost that at one point. Now it's back.

00:56:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think everybody's seen that picture at this point of the pancake green that was installed there because I guess Clifford Roberts wanted to create a more visibility for the gallery, but that that version of the hole was was short lived and eventually restored by Byron Nelson. I think Byron Nelson at least contributed to the restoration of it. And they did a pretty good job. They If you look at the original picture and you look at the current version, hey, kudos, nice, nicely done. Maybe one of the very earliest instances of Golden Age golf course.

00:57:12
Speaker 2: Restoration, maybe the first, maybe the first think of it.

00:57:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they did. They did a damn good job, and that hole is just great. It's it's I think on some days, many days it's my favorite existing hole at Augusta National. And yep, my understanding is that the model there was the seventeenth at Mirfield.

00:57:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you're right, the whole was sort of model up in seventeenth, but then the green was his version of a punch bowl.

00:57:42
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, so there are some similarities. Yeah, I mean the Mierfield hole also has some some of that surrounding. It is kind of like a bit of a punch bowl like that, but but Augusta's version is way more pronounced.

00:57:57
Speaker 2: Yea, for what I can see, you wouldn't really think of it as punch bowl. But like, conceptually he was thinking of how the ball would feed in different pins and sort of called a quasi punch ble.

00:58:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then if you miss on the wrong side of the mounds, then then things get really hairy. And that might be the main distinction between the eighth Augusta National and your usual punch bowl where everything kind of feeds in. There's a rejecting portion of the green complex on eight and we see that affect players in the Masters all the time. If they have to hit that shot from down low on the left side of the eighth green complex, that is a gnarly, very difficult shot. And the chip is pretty dicey from the right side of the green complex as well, and it's all short grass exactly.

00:58:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, you just nailed it, which is think about interesting those recovery shots are and you're not playing out of bunkers. Yeah, you know, it's arguably harder if the turf is maintained correctly, if you have the correct economical regiment and it's firm and fast. That's a harder recovery shot for those guys than hitting out of bunkers is. And guess what, it's also an easier recovery shot for high handicappers.

00:59:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the radical elements of Augusta National's design have so much in common with the general themes of Mackenzie's nineteen thirties. The use of short grass everywhere, the minimal use of bunkers. It was much more minimal when the course was initially built. There many more bunkers at Augusta National now, but still compared to a lot of especially modern golf courses, Augusta Nationals still doesn't have that many bunkers. And you know, it's just it's funny to think of Augusta National being an economized design, a course that was designed to be maintained very affordably, because of course, the maintenance standards there have gone a different direction and the maintenance budget has gone a different there. But it was designed to be maintained affordably, partly because of the period in which it was built and partly because that's just something that Alistair Mackenzie believed. It's something that he believed would give the course permanence, that would allow the course to continue to exist, which was very much a point of emphasis for him.

01:00:18
Speaker 2: And real quick, I just want to mention on the bunkering, on the the minimalization of bunkering. The economy and bunkering that we've talked about a couple of times. There's a few different components of this. One is like, there's just the economization factor of fewer bunkers to maintain, it's cheaper to maintain. But secondly, he thought of it also in terms of if you could create sufficient strategy with like only one bunker as opposed to three or four or five bunkers, and you design a hole in a way where the strategy value functions the same way, well, that is much more powerful actually then having all these other bunkers. So in the case of Augusta, he started with thirty six holes on the plan, and then he started stop blocking bunkers and got down to twenty two because he thought like, well, there's just redundancy there. I don't necessarily need three bunkers. If I can accomplish the same strategic value with one bunker, that's actually more powerful and there's a minimalization component there. I kind of think of this in terms of writing and writers. I think really good writers, which I.

01:01:34
Speaker 1: Just think of the same thing. Write a sentence and then take away as many words as possible in revisions.

01:01:40
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly if you can, if you can express something in a sentence in eight words as opposed to fifteen words, and you're expressing the entirety of the statement, that eight word sentence is much more powerful than the fifteen word sentence.

01:01:58
Speaker 1: And this gets me into the next subject that I wanted to talk about with you, or the last subject that I wanted to talk about, And that is how this era of McKenzie's career might influence the golf architecture that we do in the twenty first century going forward. And I think part of that. My thought about that is that the nineteen thirties for Alistair mackenzie was true minimalism. He was working toward actual minimalism, which has been in short supply in twenty first century golf architecture. Is I think many architects who have been labeled minimalist would it would freely admit. I think I think many many of the architects we consider minimalists would would say outwardly, yeah, it's I'm that label doesn't really fit me anymore. We've kind of lost the meaning of that word. But McKenzie was working towards something that's truly like minimalism. By which I mean he in the design process was trying to reduce the number of components that would lead to a great hole. He would design a hole, and then he would start to erase and condense until he got to a form that was as concise and simple as possible, but still express the idea and still produce the playing strategy that he was looking for. That is minimalism, to my mind. It's not necessarily moving as little dirt as possible, though that has something to do with it. The true spirit of minimalism in other art forms is trying to whittle down the form of something to its essence, and that's I think what Mackenzie was trying to go for in this portion of his career. So that's my thought about how it could how it could influence us. Now it seems like you agree with that.

01:03:48
Speaker 2: Thought, completely agree. And you know I've been I tell this to clients all the time, you know, I just I'm also an amateur student of economics, and I love the study of economics, and I don't think enough golf course architects really have the thinking in terms of the true economics of building a golf course and maintaining a golf course and how that would affect the way you would design it, and going back to the three verticals that we mentioned at the outset, I think that that's the future of golf architecture in my mind going forward in the twenty first century, is this idea of minimalism beyond naturalism. It's not just an aesthetic quality. It's as you said, it's trying to get down to the simplest, most powerful form and then tying that into really the financials of golf operation because they have to be viable, and this gets to resources, this gets to inputs, this gets to there's all sorts of rabbit holes we can go down to. But yeah, I really think that that's the future going forward is Yeah, there's plenty of clubs that have the resources to be able to have a crew to maintain one hundred and fifty bunkers or whatever they've got. But you know, there's plenty of opportunities for a really good public course, a municipal course to have ten fifteen bunkers, you know, a really small footprint when it comes to that, and just designed in a way where it's so easy and simplistic to maintain a single height of cut basically one mower where you don't have to have different mowers but different different personnel on different pieces of equipment. You can just mowed all the same piece of equipment. And those days they were using what we call gang mowers, which had like a giant pass, you know, like a nine gang unit and you do like a twenty five foot wide swath of turf, you know. And if you're mowing something, if you mowing a course or something like that, well you have to think about how the way you're building it to be able to ensure that it could be mowed that way. So I think that's the future of in particular public golf, in particular municipal golf is going back to the way Mackenzie was thinking in nineteen early nineteen thirties up until the time he died.

01:06:08
Speaker 1: All right, well, well, thank you for coming on the podcast, Josh. Always interesting to talk to you.

01:06:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, always fun talking to you, Garent, thanks for having me on.

01:06:15
Speaker 1: Of course. This episode of Designing Golf was produced by PJ Clark. Thank you, PJ. If you enjoyed this deep dive into Mackenzie's career in the nineteen thirties, I can guarantee that you would love the content that we're doing in Club TF. Club TFE is Frida Egg Golf's membership. It's one hundred and twenty dollars a year and you get a ton with that. So go to the Frida egg dot com slash membership to see what CLUBTF is all about. People are calling it the hottest club in town. I don't know that you know what. I actually agree with that it's the hottest club in town. CLUBTF. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.